


air

by orphan_account



Category: Hamilton - Miranda
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-11-08
Updated: 2015-11-08
Packaged: 2018-04-30 16:06:49
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 518
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5170040
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Alexander counts lives in breaths.</p>
            </blockquote>





	air

Every one of his joints is on fire, his head light, stomach clenching with an aching want on nothing. Acrid remnants of his last week of heaving stick to his teeth, to the back of his raw throat. Even so, Alexander feels his mother breathe her last.

The labored wheezing next to his ear, stinking of bile and necrosis, stops at the same time her arms around him go limp. He’s too weak to call for their doctor, too wrapped up in his own pain to move away. It’ll be half an hour before their doctor returns to check on them, regarding Alexander with a pitiful eye as he removes him from his mother and attends to her.

His fever breaks after three days but he dreams about that last exhale for years. When he falls asleep at his clerk’s desk, on the ship to Boston, in New York.

Ned used to push him away in his sleep, Carribean humidity compounded by Alexander’s face so close to his, small ear held half an inch from his nose. Years later, Alexander would toss awake in the night, press one hand to Laurens’s chest and count three slow, steady breaths before he’s able to fall back asleep. John would snore straight through, exhausted as they are from their day-to-day work with the General.

Long after Valley Forge, Eliza would stir with him, equally tired but attuned to the distresses of her family. Home from war, Alexander would sit by Philip’s crib, watching his little chest rise and fall. (Eighteen years later his worst nightmare comes back to haunt him; his first son dies in agony, jagged heaving breaths slowed to nothing.)

He watches Angelica just as carefully, Alexander Jr., then James, John, William, baby Elizabeth. Little Phil.

In his final moments Alexander feels air enter and leave his lungs, the former with difficulty and the latter with less. His scientific mind tells him that he won’t survive this; his heart says that it’s about damn time. Eliza is calm for his sake, but he sees her knuckles whiten, each inhale more like a gasp against some immeasurable weight in her chest.

Eliza will live on.

Alexander wonders if that thought emerges as the fervent, delirious wish of a dying man. Eliza will not orphan their children; Eliza will breathe life into their legacy; sensible, compassionate Eliza has everything to live for, she deserves more than Hamilton can give her. She always has.

She’s always breathed deep, even and steady as if she would never stop.

Angelica’s face swims into clarity, her expression unyielding as always, though he glimpses the lines of grief in it. Eliza sits next to her sister, dark eyes boring into his.

Eliza reaches. Alexander assumes she’s taken his hands; he can’t feel them anymore. She opens her mouth but the sound arrives at his ears from some far-off place, certainly not from two feet away.

“Are you satisfied?”

“No.” Alexander smiles helplessly as his vision dims again. “I’ve run out of time.”

“Yes,” Eliza says.

Something in her voice seems to echo,  _But I have not._


End file.
